US Business

US House Speaker Nancy Pelosi landed in Taiwan late Tuesday, defying a string of increasingly stark warnings and threats from China that have sent tensions between the world’s two superpowers soaring.

Pelosi, second in line to the presidency, is the highest-profile elected US official to visit Taiwan in 25 years and Beijing has made clear that it regards her presence as a major provocation, setting the region on edge.

Live broadcasts showed the 82-year-old lawmaker, who flew on a US military aircraft, being greeted at Taipei’s Songshan Airport by foreign minister Joseph Wu.

“Our delegation’s visit to Taiwan honors America’s unwavering commitment to supporting Taiwan’s vibrant democracy,” she said in a statement upon her arrival, adding that her visit “in no way contradicts” US policy towards Taipei and Beijing. 

Taiwan said the trip displayed “rock solid” support from Washington. 

Pelosi is currently on a tour of Asia and while neither she nor her office confirmed the Taipei visit in advance, multiple US and Taiwanese media outlets reported it was on the cards — triggering days of mounting anger from Beijing. 

China’s military said it was on “high alert” and would “launch a series of targeted military actions in response” to the visit.

It promptly announced plans for a series of military exercises in waters around the island to begin on Wednesday, including “long-range live ammunition shooting” in the Taiwan Strait.

“Those who play with fire will perish by it,” Beijing’s foreign ministry added. 

Taiwan’s defence ministry said more than 21 Chinese military aircraft had flown on Tuesday into Taiwan’s air defence identification zone — an area wider than its territorial airspace that overlaps with part of China’s own air defence zone. 

– No need for ‘crisis’ –

China considers self-ruled, democratic Taiwan as its territory and has vowed to one day seize the island, by force if necessary. 

It tries to keep Taiwan isolated on the world stage and opposes countries having official exchanges with Taipei.

In a call with US President Joe Biden last week, Chinese President Xi Jinping warned Washington against “playing with fire” on Taiwan.

While the Biden administration is understood to be opposed to Pelosi’s Taiwan stop, White House National Security Council spokesman John Kirby said she was entitled to go where she pleased. 

“There is no reason for this to erupt into conflict. There’s no change to our policy,” he told CNN shortly after Pelosi’s arrival.

The last speaker of the US House of Representatives to visit Taiwan was Newt Gingrich in 1997.

Kirby reiterated that US policy was unchanged toward Taiwan.

This means support for its self-ruling government, while diplomatically recognising Beijing over Taipei and opposing a formal independence declaration by Taiwan or a forceful takeover by China.

Russia’s foreign ministry called Pelosi’s visit a “clear provocation,” and said Beijing “has the right to take necessary measures to protect its sovereignty and territorial integrity over the Taiwan issue.”

China has refused to condemn Russia’s invasion of Ukraine and has been accused of providing diplomatic cover for the Kremlin by blasting Western sanctions and arms sales to Kyiv.

– All eyes on Taiwan –

Pelosi left Kuala Lumpur Tuesday after meeting Malaysian Prime Minister Ismail Sabri and Foreign Minister Saifuddin Abdullah.

So many people were tracking the US military plane ferrying her on FlightRadar that the website said some users experienced outages.

The plane took a circuitous route that avoided the South China Sea — which Beijing claims — before heading up the east coast of the Philippines. 

Press access around Pelosi has been tightly restricted and limited to a handful or short statements confirming meetings with officials.

Her itinerary includes stops in South Korea and Japan — but the prospect of a Taiwan trip dominated attention.

Taipei’s government had stayed silent on whether she would visit but news kept leaking out.

The capital’s famous Taipei 101 skyscraper was illuminated with the words “Speaker Pelosi… Thank You” on Tuesday night an hour before Pelosi’s plane arrived. 

– ‘Seek to punish Taiwan’ –

Taiwan’s 23 million people have long lived with the possibility of an invasion, but that threat has intensified under Xi, China’s most assertive ruler in a generation.

“Beijing shouldn’t get to decide who can visit Taiwan or how the US should interact with Taiwan,” Wang Ting-yu, a lawmaker from the ruling Democratic Progressive Party, told AFP ahead of the visit. 

“I think China’s open intimidation is counter-effective.”

Bonnie Glaser, director of the Asia programme at the US-based German Marshall Fund think tank, said the probability of Beijing choosing war was “low”. 

“But the probability that… (China) will take a series of military, economic, and diplomatic actions to show strength & resolve is not insignificant,” she wrote on Twitter.

Taipei’s Council of Agriculture on Tuesday said China had suspended the import of some Taiwanese goods, including some fishery products, tea and honey. The council said China cited regulatory breaches.

Pelosi’s potential visit has been preceded by a flurry of military activity across the region that highlights how combustible the issue of Taiwan is.

Voters headed to the polls in the Midwestern US state of Kansas Tuesday to weigh in on the first major ballot on abortion since the Supreme Court ended the national right to the procedure in June.

The vote is heavy with consequences for Kansans, who will decide whether to remove the right to terminate a pregnancy from the traditionally conservative state’s constitution.

But it is also seen as a test case for abortion rights nationwide, as Republican-dominated legislatures rush to impose strict bans on the procedure following the Supreme Court’s decision to overturn Roe v. Wade.

Turnout was high after polls opened at 7:00 am (1200 GMT), according to poll worker Marsha Barrett, who said some 250 voters had come to the station in Olathe by noon — the same number it might see all day in a presidential election. 

“This election is crazy,” Barrett told AFP. “People are determined to vote.”

Other states including California and Kentucky are set to vote on the hot-button issue in November, at the same time as Congressional midterm elections in which both Republicans and Democrats hope to use it to mobilize their supporters nationwide.

In Kansas, the ballot centers on a 2019 ruling by the state’s supreme court that guarantees access to abortion — currently up to the 22-week stage of pregnancy. 

In response, the Republican-dominated state legislature introduced an amendment known as “Value Them Both” that would scrap the constitutional right — with the stated aim of handing regulation of the procedure back to lawmakers.

In the opposing camp, activists see the campaign as a barely masked bid to clear the way for an outright ban — one state legislator has already introduced a bill that would ban abortion without exceptions for rape, incest, or the mother’s life. 

For Ashley All, spokeswoman for pro-abortion rights campaign Kansans for Constitutional Freedom, the amendment would deal a blow to “personal autonomy.”

Activists also complain that the phrasing of the ballot question is counterintuitive, and potentially confusing: voting “Yes” to the amendment means abortion rights being curbed, while people who wish to keep those rights intact must vote “No.” 

First-time voter Morgan Spoor knew she wanted to vote “no” to support “the right to choose.”

“I really want my word out there, especially as a female,” the 19-year-old told AFP. “I don’t think anyone can say what a woman can do with their body.”

– All eyes on Kansas –

Abortion rights advocates in Kansas are looking nervously to neighboring Oklahoma and Missouri, which are among at least eight states to have passed near-total bans — the latter making no exceptions for rape or incest — while Midwestern Indiana adopted its own rigid ban on Saturday.

Kara Miller Karns, a voter in Leawood, said she planned to vote for the status quo on Tuesday, saying it was “not acceptable” for her daughters to grow up with fewer rights than she did. 

But in the same Kansas neighborhood, 43-year-old Christine Vasquez said she planned to back the constitutional amendment — in hope it would clear the way for a future vote on an abortion ban.

“I believe that life starts at conception,” she told AFP ahead of the ballot.

The outcome in Kansas could mean a boost or a blow to either side of the highly charged abortion debate.

Kansas leans heavily toward the Republican Party, which favors stricter abortion regulations, but a 2021 survey from Fort Hays State University found that fewer than 20 percent of Kansas respondents agreed that abortion should be illegal even in cases of rape or incest.

US households have continued to take on more debt, in part to deal with soaring prices, a report showed Tuesday, while cases of borrowers unable to pay loans are creeping up in a troubling sign of things to come.

Facing the biggest surge in inflation in more than four decades, which is squeezing families trying to make ends meet, the New York Federal Reserve Bank’s latest report shows credit card balances in the April-June quarter surged by the most in 20 years.

Total household debt posted a two percent increase in the latest three months, and is now $2 trillion more than the pre-pandemic level, the report showed.

While family finances remain in good shape for now — helped by government aid and the ban on foreclosures — researchers caution that the era of historically low delinquencies is coming to an end, especially among those with lower credit scores known as “subprime borrowers.”

“The second quarter of 2022 showed robust increases in mortgage, auto loan, and credit card balances, driven in part by rising prices,” said Joelle Scally, of the New York Fed’s Center for Microeconomic Data.

“While household balance sheets overall appear to be in a strong position, we are seeing rising delinquencies among subprime and low-income borrowers with rates approaching pre-pandemic levels.”

Delinquency rates remain low and an increase is to be expected as the moratoria on foreclosures end, but the report warns that data point to potential trouble ahead for communities that “are experiencing the economy differently.” 

“We are seeing a hint of the return of the delinquency and hardship patterns we saw prior to the pandemic,” New York Fed researchers said in a blog post.

Total household debt rose $312 billion in the quarter to $16.15 trillion, and the biggest component — mortgages — jumped $207 billion to just under $11.4 trillion, the report said. However, the amount of new home loans fell, amid rising lending rates.

Credit card balances (up $46 billion) and auto loans (up $33 billion to $1.5 trillion) were impacted by rising prices, the report said.

Meanwhile, student loans, which still benefit from pandemic forbearance programs, were essentially flat at $1.6 trillion.

Weeks before the first anniversary of a retreat from Afghanistan that critics said exposed President Joe Biden’s weakness, he shrugged off both Covid and critics to announce the killing in Kabul of Al-Qaeda’s leader — an operation the Democrat says shows the US remains as strong as ever. 

“When I ended our military mission in Afghanistan almost a year ago, I made the decision that after 20 years of war, the United States no longer needed thousands of boots on the ground in Afghanistan,” Biden told the nation late Monday as he announced the death of Ayman al-Zawahiri.

“I made a promise to the American people that we’d continue to conduct effective counterterrorism operations… We’ve done just that.”

Announcing jihadist leader deaths has become a ritual — both somber and highly political — for presidents ever since the attacks of September 11, 2001.

Barack Obama’s 2011 revelation of the daring operation to kill Osama bin Laden in his home in Pakistan electrified the nation. On hearing Obama, a skilled orator, people poured into the streets, chanting “USA!”

Donald Trump took a different approach in 2019, using gory language to deliver news of a raid to kill Islamic State group leader Abu Bakr Al-Baghdadi in Syria — and to bolster his own strong man image.

“He died like a dog,” Trump said.

For Biden, the setting was inauspicious. Isolating from a case of rebound Covid-19, battered in the polls and facing the anniversary this month of the traumatic August 2021 exit of US troops from Kabul, the Democrat is in a weak position.

In a nod to Covid ventilation measures, his speech was delivered from the noisy balcony of the Blue Room. As he touted American resilience, Washington police sirens wailed in the background.

Yet the timing of the speech could not have been better for a president seeking to change the narrative.

While steering clear of triumphalism, Biden noted that Zawahiri had been on the wanted list “for years under presidents (George W.) Bush, Obama and Trump.”

The implication — that the country is safe in Biden’s hands — was clear.

“No matter how long it takes, no matter where you hide, if you are a threat to our people, the United States will find you and take you out,” Biden said.

– Afghan strategy debate –

Critics on the right and left see last year’s US withdrawal from Kabul as a show of ineptitude that, in addition to being a humiliating spectacle, will make Afghanistan a hotbed of anti-American Islamic groups, similar to the time of 9/11.

Biden argues he had the courage to pull the plug on a failed war conducted by three previous presidents and that there simply was never going to be a neat ending to the debacle.

Dismissing skeptics, he also promised that American “over the horizon” capabilities meant there’d be no more need to risk US lives on the ground.

Now with the Zawahiri killing, Biden has a golden opportunity to say that he’s been proved right.

Afghanistan “can’t be a launching pad against the United States,” Biden said in his speech. “This operation is a clear demonstration that we will, we can, and we’ll always make good on the solemn pledge.”

– Downsides –

There was instant praise from even unlikely quarters, with the anchor on the often hostile Fox News’ evening broadcast calling it “President Biden’s bin Laden moment” and “a huge, huge win for the US.”

Some experts, however, caution against the White House spin.

James Jeffrey, a former US ambassador to Iraq and now chair of the Wilson Center think tank’s Middle East Program, applauded the demonstration of “excellent intelligence, an operational strike capability and decisiveness.”

However, that expertise does not outweigh the “chaos” of last year’s Afghan withdrawal, which Jeffrey blamed on poor coordination and Biden’s “handicapping” of staff through his refusal to accept there could be any downsides to pulling out — or to plan for them.

Nathan Sales, another former diplomat who works at the Atlantic Council, said Zawahiri’s mere presence in Kabul was a failure for the United States, suggesting “as feared, the Taliban is once more granting safe haven to the leaders of Al-Qaeda.”

And it’s too early to say whether one spectacular drone strike “can be replicated against other terrorist targets,” he said.

“Until we know more, we should resist the urge to see the strike as a vindication of ‘over the horizon’ counterterrorism.”

Rain and cooler conditions brought some relief on Tuesday to hundreds of firefighters battling a wildfire in northern California that has killed two people and threatens the 8,000-strong town of Yreka.

State fire department, CalFire, said that while the weather had “mitigated fire spread,” vegetation in the area “remains extremely dry” and in danger of being ignited by lightning strikes. 

“The continued threat of thunderstorms and the associated strong, erratic winds could result in increased fire behavior,” CalFire said.

The McKinney fire burning in the Klamath National Forest near the border with Oregon is California’s largest wildfire so far this year — though it remains much smaller than last year’s Dixie Fire, which burned nearly one million acres.

More than 55,000 acres (22,000 hectares) of the sparsely populated forest have been ravaged and the blaze is zero percent contained, according to CalFire.

Firefighters are constructing containment lines to prevent the fire from spreading, including using bulldozers to build a firebreak to protect Yreka, the county seat of Siskiyou County.

The McKinney Fire has killed two people, according to the Siskiyou County Sheriff’s Office.

Firefighters found two people dead on Sunday inside a burned-out car in the driveway of a home in the town of Klamath River.

Sheriff Jeremiah LaRue said the pair were likely caught in the swift-moving blaze as they tried to flee.

Sherri Marchetti-Perrault, who lived off of Highway 96, told the Los Angeles Times that her home had burned to the ground.

“When we left, everything was on fire,” Marchetti-Perrault told the newspaper. “It happened so fast. We left with the clothes on our back. We couldn’t breathe and we couldn’t see.”

– ‘Holding out’ – 

California, along with much of the western United States, is in the grip of its worst drought in more than 1,000 years.

The drought, exacerbated by man-made climate change, has left the countryside parched and vulnerable to the wildfires that naturally break out, making the blazes hotter, faster and more destructive.

California Governor Gavin Newsom has declared a state of emergency in Siskiyou County, and more than 2,000 residents of the rural area are under evacuation orders.

According to the Siskiyou County Sheriff’s Office, the fire has destroyed more than 100 structures — including homes, a grocery store and a community center — in the area around Yreka.

“Surrounding areas should be ready to leave if needed. Please don’t hesitate to evacuate,” the county sheriff tweeted.

“I’m holding out trying not to leave too soon because I’m helping out my mom,” said Rafael Franco, who lives in the mandatory evacuation area.

“She’s not in the best physical health to get around,” Franco told AFP.

“At the last minute if I see the fire cross the ridge where we are, we are going to head out and grab what we can and get going and hope for the best.”

Marjie Lawrence, who fled Klamath River on Friday night, said she went back to retrieve some belongings in case the fire spread to her home. 

“We are taking stuff in case the house goes, we are taking things we want, but not too many,” Lawrence said.

The McKinney Fire comes just days after the Oak Fire near Yosemite National Park destroyed dozens of buildings and forced thousands to evacuate.

California still has months of fire season ahead of it.

Other parts of the world have also faced intense wildfires this year, as scientists say climate change is making heatwaves more frequent and more intense, increasing the risk of fires.